Achieving Best Practice in Writing

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Best Practice Writing Instruction

In our work, we have found that best practice is achieved when we focus our efforts on six instructional areas:

  1. Writers Workshop - A system for classroom management and the development of an effective writing community - Focused mini-lessons taught in the context of authentic writing; the majority of class time reserved for writing; conferencing; sharing; students choosing their own topics and forms; emphasis on authentic audiences and purposeful communication; writer’s notebooks; frequent teacher modeling; five days a week, 45-60 minutes per day at elementary, etc.
  2. Writing Process - Teaching students how to write the way real writers do - Pre-writing to develop ideas; drafting to increase fluency and expression; sharing to get feedback; revision to apply feedback; editing to produce conventional writing; publishing to make work available with others (twice a month on average); assessing to understand strengths and weaknesses and determine goals for improvement.
  3. Writing Strategies - Reliable, reusable tehcniques that help writers solve common problems - lead strategies; ending strategies; pacing strategies, transition strategies, sentence strategies, conventions strategies; etc.
  4. Six Traits - A language of quality that defines good writing - Ideas: main idea, details, showing, purpose, originality; Organization: leads, endings, transitions, pacing, sequencing; Voice: personality, style, respect for audience; honesty; control; Word Choice: strong verbs, specific nouns and modifiers, appropriate vocabulary, memorable phrases, grammar and usage; Sentence Fluency: length, beginnings, sound, expression, construction; Conventions: capitalization, ending punctuation, internal punctuation, paragraphing, spelling.
  5. Authentic forms of writing - that match as closely as possible to the forms that real writers use in the real world - narrative, persuasive, letters, procedures, information reports etc.
  6. Reading-Writing Connection - Helping students internalize reading and writing as complimentary aspects of literate communication - using quality literature as good examples of writing, Studying the same forms in reading that we want students to write; Reading and evaluating the writing of other students; etc.